The opinion of the court was delivered by: David R. Herndon Chief Judge United States District Court

ORDER

GOVERNING THE FORMAT OF DOCUMENT PRODUCTION WHEREAS, Plaintiff and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. have met and conferred on the procedures and format relating to the production of documents and things, and having agreed on production formats for certain types of documents, as well as a process for conferring on, and resolving, production formats for other potential types of documents, it is SO ORDERED:

A. GENERAL

1. The parties will take reasonable steps to comply with this Order.

2. In the event this Order does not otherwise provide for the method of production, the parties shall meet and confer in good faith on a manner of production that balances the needs for production to be efficient, cost effective and reasonably useable and in a manner that will avoid cumulative or duplicative document discovery attempting to minimize the burdens and costs on the producing party.

3. Except as specifically limited herein, the Order governs the production of discoverable documents by the parties during the Litigation. This Order will not enlarge or affect the proper scope of discovery in this Litigation, nor imply that discovery produced under the terms of this Order is properly discoverable, relevant, or admissible in this or in any other litigation. Nor does this Order alter or expand the preservation obligations of the parties.

4. The parties are reminded of their respective obligations to preserve relevant information as required under federal law.

5. All documents that are responsive to discovery requests and not designated as privileged (i.e., subject to the attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine) will be produced, subject to objections and responses, and subject to the parties' Protective Order and/or Confidentiality Order, in the manner provided herein. Conversely, nothing in this Order will be interpreted to require disclosure of materials that a party contends are protected from disclosure by the Protective Order, Confidentiality Order, or the attorney-client privilege and/or the attorney work-product doctrine. Nothing in this Order will be deemed to limit or modify in any way the terms of the parties' Protective Order or Confidentiality Order.

B. PRODUCTION PROTOCOLS

1. General Format of Production. All documents produced in this litigation shall be produced as electronic TIFF images with associated text (OCR or extracted text as set forth herein), metadata, and objective coding, unless another production format is designated herein or otherwise agreed to by the parties.

2. Production of Electronic Images and Associated Data. Except as limited in this paragraph or as described herein, all documents that originally existed in electronic or hard-copy form that are produced in these proceedings shall be produced in electronic image form in the manner provided herein. To the extent exceptions to the foregoing are required, the parties will meet and confer to discuss alternative production requirements, concerns, or formats. Except for redacted documents, each document produced pursuant to this Order shall convey the same information in the electronic image(s) produced as the original document. Documents that present other imaging or formatting problems shall be promptly identified by the receiving party and the parties shall meet and confer to attempt to resolve the problems.

a. Document Image Format. All production document images, whether scanned from hard copy documents or generated from native electronic documents, shall be provided as single-page Tagged Image File Format (".tiff format"), using Group 4 compression at 300 dpi resolution, and shall reflect, without visual degradation, the full and complete information contained in the original document, unless redacted. Reasonable efforts will be used to scan the pages at or near their original size and so that the image appears straight and not skewed. Physically oversized originals, however, may appear reduced. In addition, reducing image size may be necessary to display Bates numbers without obscuring text. The documents shall be logically grouped together and produced in accordance with Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The parties shall meet and confer to the extent reasonably necessary to facilitate the import and use of the produced materials with commercially available document management or litigation support software.

b. Load Files: Load file means an electronic file provided with a production set of document images that facilitates the loading of such information into a receiving party's document review platform, and the correlation of such data in the platform. A properly delimited ASCII text file containing Metadata and any objective coding required to be provided pursuant to this Order, an IPRO (LFP file) or OPTICON load file for tiff images, and document level ASCII OCR or Extracted text files named with the corresponding StartBates or BegBates document ID. The receiving party will provide the producing party with load file specifications 14 days in advance of the date of the first production. The producing party will have the right to request a sample load file and deliver a small first production to ensure the load file works and avoid any unnecessary costs associated with a faulty large-scale production.

c. Document Unitization. Each page of a hard copy document shall be scanned into an image and if a document is more than one page, the unitization of the document and any attachments shall be maintained as it existed in the original when creating the image file. For documents that contain fixed notes, the pages will be scanned with the notes and those pages will be treated as part of the same document. The relationship of documents in a document collection (e.g., cover letter and enclosures, email and attachments, binder containing multiple documents, or other documents where a parent-child relationship exists between the documents) shall be maintained. If more than one level of parent-child relationship exists, documents will be kept in order, but all will be treated as children of the initial parent document. Such information shall be produced in the load file and metadata or objective coding, as set forth herein, in a manner to enable the parent-child relationship among ...

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